3. Be technical

You don't have to write code but you do have to understand how it is built and how it works.

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4. The CEO of a startup must, must, must be the product manager

He/she must own the functional user experience.

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5. Stack rank your features

escher

No two features are ever created equal. You can't do everything all at once. Force prioritization.

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6. Use a bug tracking system and religiously manage development action items from it.

Thomas Shahan

Keep improving the user experience and the product, even before things go wrong.

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7. Ship it

Louis Vest

You'll never know how good your product is until real people touch it and give you feedback.

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8. Ship it fast and ship it often

Michelle Kelley

Don't worry about adding that extra feature. Ship the bare minimum feature set required in order to start gathering user feedback. Get feedback, repeat the process, and ship the next version and the next version as quickly as possible.

If you're taking more than 3 months to launch your first consumer-facing product, you're taking too long. If you're taking more than 3 weeks to ship updates, you're taking too long. Ship small stuff weekly, if not several times per week. Ship significant releases in 3 week intervals.

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9. The only thing that matters is how good your product is

All the rest is noise.

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10. The only judge of how good your product is is how much your users use it

Jo Bickerton

Without customers, you don't have a company.

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11. Therefore, the earliest sign of future success is traction

In the early days, the key determinant of your future success is traction. Spend the majority of your time figuring out how to cultivate pockets of traction amongst your early adopters and optimize around that traction.

Traction begets more traction if you are able to jump on it.

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12. You’re doing really well if 50% of what you originally planned on doing turns out to actually work

Christof

Follow your users as much as possible.

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13. But don’t rely on focus groups to tell you what to build

Focus groups can tell you what to fix and help you identify potentially interesting kernels for you to hone in on, but you still need to figure out how to synthesize such input and where to take your users.

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14. Most people really only heavily use about 5 to 7 services

If you want to be an important product and a big business, you will need to figure out how to fit into one of those 5 to 7 services, which means capturing your user's fascination, enthusiasm, and trust.

You need to give your users a real reason to add you into their time.

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15. Try to ride an existing wave vs. creating your own market

Nisa+Ulli Maier

If you can, catch onto an emerging macro trend and ride it.

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16. Find yourself a “sherpa”

M. Longfellow

This is someone who has done it before — raised money, done deals, worked with startups. Give this person 1 to 2% of your company in exchange for their time. Rely on them to open doors to future investors. Use them as a sounding board for corporate development issues.

Don't do this by committee. Advisory boards never amount to much. Find one person, make them your sherpa, and lean on them.

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17. Work with the best possible people for your project, regardless of where they are located

nicolehr6

Don't settle for less even if there's pressure for time.

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18. Co-locate as best possible but be willing to travel to remote offices to make multiple offices work

Max Westby

Online collaboration maxes out at 3 to 4 weeks apart, which means you need to commit to traveling almost monthly to make remote offices work.

42. Related to #41, understand whether your business is a VC business or not.

A VC business is expected to deliver 10x returns to investors. That means if you're taking money with a $5M post-money valuation, the expectation is that you are building for a minimum $50M exit. $10M post-money valuation = $100M target.

hat's not to say that you might not sell the company for less and everyone involved might be happy with that outcome, but that's not what you are signing up for when you take VC money with such a valuation. Know what the implications of taking VC money are and what it means for expectations on you.

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43. Make sure your personal business goals are aligned with the goals of your investors